The Condition and Prospects of Catholics in England.
By An English Catholic.
Surrounded as we are on all sides by apostles of progress, ever ready to taunt and ridicule those who linger in the shadows of the past, it would be distressing indeed to Catholics in general, and especially to English Catholics, if they could with justice be reproached as stationary or retrograde. Happily they are of all men least open to the charge. They advance on a double line. They share in the common march of society; they adopt every latest improvement; they fully accept and reciprocate the blessings of civilization; but their religion also, which is in itself progress, increases and multiplies throughout the globe, and particularly in the British empire. It has derived strength from the world's social and political changes; it is inspired more than ever with the breath of freedom; and the very means which accelerate science and commerce supply it with wings and coat it with mail. It not only advances on a double line, but it has likewise a twofold nature and a duplex power. This wonderful religion is both old and new; it unites the weight and authority of age with the freshness and vigor of youth. To the English it is both ancient and modern. It was the venerable faith of their ancestors, and it is, by a gracious revolution in the moral world, the old religion revived, with all the charms of novelty—a second spring revisiting the long desolate and wintry land. It comes back to us with all its time-honored appliances; with its sacred symbols and solemn rites; its orders, congregations, and retreats; its colleges, institutions, poor schools, homes, orphanages, almshouses, hospitals, and libraries—but it comes, moreover, with means and advantages proportioned to its difficulties, and such as in old times it could not boast. It has now in its hands the mighty machinery of the press, with the Scriptures, the Missal and Church Offices in the vulgar tongue. It flourishes amid liberal institutions, and acquires no little vigor from free discussion, persuading where once it ruled. It affiliates to itself all physical truths, all discoveries in science, as affording fresh evidence of the power and wisdom of God. It engages in historical research with impartiality formerly unknown, relying on documentary proofs, and scrutinizing all that is legendary. It joyfully accepts and utilizes the steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph. It finds in them fresh instruments of good, new links to knit nations together in a common faith, swift convoys of Christian missions, and electric tongues of flame to spread the gospel of Christ.
During the last forty years the Catholic renaissance in England has been rapid beyond all that could have been expected or was even hoped. It is not to the emancipation act of 1829, to the increase of the episcopate in 1840, nor to the creation of the hierarchy in 1850, that this surprising growth is mainly to be ascribed. The removal of political disabilities gave Catholics in England, no doubt, a respectability and courage which they had not before; but they would still have continued, on the whole, a despised and scattered remnant—mere "pebbles and detritus" as Newman says, [Footnote 103] "of the great deluge"—if there had not arisen in the very heart of the Established Church a little band of learned and pious men, who, strong in genius and in prayer, valiantly defended many distinctively Catholic doctrines, and ended by professing openly or virtually their adhesion to our entire system of faith and morals. This it was which caused English Catholics, when they emerged, as it were, from the catacombs, [Footnote 104] to lift up their heads, to challenge a new investigation of the grounds of their belief, and to submit them confidently to every test that history, Scripture, reason, and experience could apply. The Tractarian movement infused fresh blood into the church's veins, and it has, during a period of thirty years, swollen our waters with a confluent stream.
[Footnote 103: Sermons on Various Occasions, p. 232.]
[Footnote 104: Card. Wiseman's Address to the Congress of Malines, p. 9.]
The tide thus set in a right direction does not cease to flow, and it is fed by sources external to ourselves. Scarcely a week passes but some persons knock at the gates of the church for admittance, who have learned the elements of Catholicism from alien teachers. Several high-church periodicals, widely circulated, such as the Union Review and the Church News, lay down, with extraordinary boldness and precision, doctrines which the so-called reformers labored to explode. Rumors are ever afloat of important conversions about to take place, and thus Catholics in England are constantly encouraged, while Anglicans are proportionally unsettled and alarmed. The Establishment is dying by the hands of its own pastors. Three hundred of them have quitted its pale, forfeited their position in society, forsaken a thousand comforts, prospects, and endearments, to follow the church in the wilderness and the pillar of fire. The largest-minded and the largest-hearted man Anglicanism ever produced, has long since taken his seat among the doctors in the true temple, and one whom Anglicans esteemed for his piety from boyhood upward, is now the primate of the English Catholic Church, and regarded among its bishops as facile princeps for learning and ability, both as a speaker and writer. The talents which were employed in promoting schism are thus turned into a healthier channel; and a multitude of able and ingenious converts in every literary guise operate beneficially on the public mind. The loud demand for unity of doctrine, a fixed standard of belief and morals, authority in matters of faith, primitive antiquity, asceticism, symbols, sacraments, and aesthetics, is being supplied. Catholic missionaries are covering the face of the land, and they are welcomed wherever they pitch their tent. Thirsting souls, weary of broken cisterns, gather round them, and ask eagerly for living water from deeper wells. Abbeys are raised on ancient sites; convent-walls crown the hills; church-bells tinkle in secluded vales; and in the towns and cities, fanes richly adorned and well served invite with open doors the docile to be taught and the penitent to be shriven. The genius of the two Pugins, the father and the son, has revived the love of mediaeval architecture; and the new churches vie with each other in majestic structure and ornate detail. The winter is now past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our land; the voice of the turtle is heard. The fig-tree hath put forth her green figs; the vines in flower yield their sweet smell. [Footnote 105]
[Footnote 105: Canticles, ii, 11-13.]
What a contrast within forty years! then the heavenly dove flying over England scarcely found where her foot might rest. The waters were abroad on the whole land, and she returned into the ark. In 1830 only 434 priests ministered through the entire country; and these were attached, for the most part, to obscure chapels in low quarters of the town, or to gloomy, old-fashioned houses in the country. Four hundred and ten unsightly buildings were then called churches; and England (which in the olden time, before the Reformation, owned 56 convents of the Dominican order alone [Footnote 106]) could not at that date claim a single religious house consisting of men. Sixteen scanty communities of nuns there were, who sighed and prayed in secret, being but the skirts of the garment of the Lamb's Bride. A change has come over the scene; and how great that change is, the following table will in some degree show: